“Being homeless, according to a friend, is like being a turtle,” said Michael Stoops, director of community organizing for the Washington, D.C.-based National Coalition for the Homeless. “You’re carrying everything you own on your back.”

Homeless people typically rent storage units to keep their most precious belongings safe and to preserve what they can of their former life, according to Stoops.

For the survey, SpareFoot contacted 100 homeless services organizations in the country’s 50 most populated metro areas. SpareFoot received 41 responses from nonprofits in 30 of those metro areas. The organizations that responded to the survey serve more than 120,000 people a year. Most provide emergency shelter, and many also provide transitional and long-term services, such as job training and health care.

The survey results: Five organizations (12 percent) responded that current or recent clients had lived in a storage unit and reported 14 such cases within the past three years. Five more responded they’d heard about people doing this, but had no specific reports from current or recent clients. The remaining 31 (76 percent) had not heard of people living in storage units.

“The majority of homeless folks are just like you and I,” Stoops said. “They’re chronically normal. All they need is a place they can afford to live in, a job that pays a decent wage and health care.”